Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Following the recent messaging from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Oversteet that Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.13 were rejected on the basis of his Code of Conduct, the Linux CoC committee has now formally announced their decision.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week for the in-development Linux 6.13 and include some nice refinements, especially for those using AMD Ryzen on Linux.

There are some new improvements in Linux 6.13 for the Intel TDX code for Trust Domain Extensions in providing hardware-based security protections for virtual machines on recent Xeon processors.

Following the Linux 6.13 DRM feature pull this week that brought many new open-source kernel graphics driver features, it's now time to further stabilize that new feature code with fixes. Sent out today were a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver code targeting the early Linux 6.13 state. In addition to fixes though is also allowing the AMDGPU Display Core "DC" code to build properly on LoongArch hardware for allowing recent AMD Radeon GPUs to work on these Chinese systems.

Going back to early in the year AMD Linux engineers began preparing support for a new Bus Lock Trap feature with Zen 5 CPUs. With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel that support is being merged.

One of the most prominent new features in Linux 6.12 was the merging of sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler innovations by altering the scheduling behavior through (e)BPF programs. With the Linux 6.13 kernel there are some nice refinements to this extensible scheduler class.

The XFS file-system updates were merged yesterday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window.

Version 1.4 of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library was released today as the Python library for use on Windows and Linux for interacting with the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI offloading on recent Intel Core Ultra processors.

SUSE engineer and sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has submitted all of the sound driver updates for the Linux 6.13 kernel.

In addition to the pull requests managed by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner for VFS untorn writes for atomic writes with XFS and EXT4, Tmpfs case insensitive file/folder support, new Rust file abstractions, and the renewed multi-grain timestamps work, another interesting Linux 6.13 pull submitted by Brauner revolves around VFS file enhancements.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 merge window in bringing many updates to the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers as well as the accelerator subsystem.

Linus Torvalds just merged the change to the Linux 6.13 kernel that goes ahead and deletes the ReiserFS file-system from the source tree. Removing ReiserFS from the Linux tree lightens the kernel by 32.8k lines of code.

Mesa 24.3 has managed to make it out today, one week ahead of the previous release plans due to the lack of any major blocker bugs appearing. Mesa 24.3 has a lot of new feature work on the contained open-source Vulkan drivers as well as evolutionary improvements to their OpenGL drivers and other user-space 3D driver code.

The four pull requests adding various SoC and board/platform support have now been merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This includes support for many older Apple iPad/iPhones, supporting another SoC with a combination of RISC-V and ARM cores, and a wide variety of other mostly ARM hardware support.

Zrythm 1.0 released today as a big milestone for this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software that caters from professional users down to beginners.

On top of an exciting Vulkan spec update out today, The Khronos Group has announced the Slang Initiative based on NVIDIA's open-source Slang compiler code.

Ahead of the upcoming freeze for Wine 10.0, VKD3D 1.14 is now available for this prominent Wine component that allows Direct3D 12 to be implemented over the Vulkan API for enhancing Windows games/apps running on Linux and other platforms.

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates landed this week for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel merge window.

PHP 8.4 is out today as the newest annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language.

Vulkan 1.3.302 was published this morning with a handful of new extensions, including AV1 encode support for Vulkan Video.

While the Bcachefs feature changes for Linux 6.13 were already submitted even before the Linux 6.12 stable kernel was released, merging these changes are supposedly on hold due to the kernel's Code of Conduct (CoC) board.

Linux 6.13 has merged support for the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity "SDUC" standard for 2TB to 128TB storage capacity SD cards.

Andrew Morton on Monday submitted all the memory management "MM" related patches for the Linux 6.13 merge window. As usual there's a lot of interesting performance optimizations and other low-level refinements.

The abundance of networking subsystem updates have been mailed in for the Linux 6.13 kernel from wired and wireless driver enhancements to core networking code improvements.

Following the initial Raspberry Pi 5 upstream support in Linux 6.12 providing basic support, an exciting Raspberry Pi addition with the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is introducing a Raspberry Pi Camera Front-End "CFE" driver.

The in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is bringing a lot of exciting improvements for AMD Linux customers.

Intel's open-source software developers released today OpenVINO 2024.5 as the newest major feature release for this cross-platform AI toolkit.

The crypto subsystem updates were merged yesterday for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel. Among other crypto improvements are new optimizations for some algorithms when running on Intel and AMD x86_64 processors.

Merged last year for Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps to address the current coarse-grained timestamps when updating creation time and modification time that a lot of I/O activity can happen in the once-per-jiffy timestamp. Just a few weeks in the Linux 6.6 kernel, multi-grain timestamps were removed due to bugs. The multigrain code went back to be reworked and now just over one year later the code has been re-merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

All of the scheduler feature changes were merged today for the Linux 6.13 kernel, including the introduction of the lazy preemption model.

FLTK 1.4 is out as the newest version of the Fast Light Toolkit that has been around since the late 90's.

While most users frown upon the increasing number of CPU security mitigations in part due to the additional overhead commonly introduced, a new Linux kernel patch by a Google engineer would allow users/developers to opt-in to forcing CPU bugs and their mitigations even if the system in use isn't known to be vulnerable.

Blender 4.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

FreeCAD 1.0 was just released as a major update to this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D parametric modeler software.

The power management subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly opened Linux 6.13 merge window. As covered within individual articles over the past few weeks, the Linux 6.13 power management updates include some notable changes for both AMD and Intel systems.

The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft's blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux... Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL.

The Debian 13 "Trixie" release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching.

WayVNC 0.9 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server catering to wlroots-based Wayland compositors. WayVNC makes it easy to get a VNC server up and running on Sway and other wlroots-based compositors while with today's update is much more capable.

Ahead of SC24, MiTAC Computing has published their open-source firmware for their Open Compute Project (OCP) designed Capri2 AMD EPYC server. This open-source firmware stack makes use of AMD's in-development openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization.

A few weeks back I wrote about Intel engineers preparing SNC6 support with Linux for six nodes per L3 cache. That was the first time hearing of SNC6 with SNC 1/2/3/4 sub-NUMA clustering modes being more common. That support is now ready for merging with the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Arch Linux package sources with its PKGBUILD files and similar have lacked carrying a clear license. Arch Linux developers have been working to come together to allow all Arch Linux package sources to be licensed under a BSD zero-clause "BSD0" license.

The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.

As of today the first handful of commits have landed in LLVM Git ahead of next year's LLVM 20.0 for beginning to enable the AMDGPU compiler back-end for "GFX950", the next iteration of the CDNA family for Instinct accelerators.

The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048.

Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.

All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions.

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.

With last month's Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes.

Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors.

DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a "major regression" as well as a few other bugs.

Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13.

The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.